A senior official for the maker of the blowout preventer that failed to stop last year's Gulf oil spill said Friday the device hadn't been tested to see if it could cut through a bent drill pipe.
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An investigator who examined the safety device that failed to prevent last year's BP oil spill said Monday his firm did not skip critical tests under pressure to meet a deadline to file a report on what caused the contraption not to work.
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An off-center drilling pipe in BP's doomed Macondo well disabled a blowout-preventer and prevented the fail-safe device from operating, a technical expert told a U.S. government panel on Monday.
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Bob Cavnar, oil and gas industry veteran and author of "Disaster on the Horizon," talks with Rachel Maddow about the lessons not learned from the Deepwater Horizon disaster as new deepwater drilling permits are being issued.

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The five-story metal mass failed to stop a giant surge of oil and gas that ignited the Deepwater Horizon rig and coated parts of the Gulf in crude for months. As NBC’s Anne Thompson reports, officials are trying to figure out why this supposedly fail-safe device failed so badly.

The 5-story-tall, 300-ton piece of machinery that should have stopped the largest oil spill in U.S. history will be transported to a NASA facility where engineers will try to piece together why it didn’t seal the well. NBC’s Anne Thompson reports.

Rachel Maddow delivers the latest news on whether the "top kill" procedure will be successful in stopping the free flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. NBC News chief environmental correspondent Anne Thompson joins to talk about the risks and other options BP could pursue should the top kill fail.

Related Photos

The damaged blowout preventer from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig is extracted by the Q4000 vessel from the Gulf of Mexico in this handout photograph taken on September 4, 2010 and released on September 5. The preventer, which was removed and replaced on the well head by a newly tested preventer, wil